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Review by Ben Williams of Comic Book News:
If you’re after a comic featuring black and white art, a character over forty years old and some wildly insane dreams, then Windy Wilberforce – Jackanapes Regained, by Ed Pinsent, is probably the comic you’re looking for. Or maybe you just want some good old small press comics fun. Either applies here!
Windy Wilberforce first appeared on the drawing paper in 1981, before being redrawn into an A5 zine in 1983. Why am I telling you this? Well, Ed Pinsent has been doing small-press comics since 1982. Windy Wilberforce is kind of like his comics baby, that is now over 40 years old. Ed has been a staple of the UK small press scene, including being a frequent contributor to Colossive Press, with three cartographies so far. Now, onto the actual comic!
Let’s start with the art, like we usually do here. Windy Wilberforce is all black and white. It’s a cartoon style that can change from panel to panel. Some have some lovely crosshatching for added detail. Others are just character outlines. Combined on the page, it works exceptionally well, adding some nice variety. It’s a style that looks fantastic without colour, and doesn’t stick to rigid character designs for some extra charm.
The Jackanapes, in particular, can look different from panel to panel. They have a wonderfully crazy look about them that screams mischievous. The switching between bold lines with no crosshatching to a more shadowed look pays off particularly well with the Jackanapes more than anything.
One of my favourite pages comes with zero dialogue, when Windy is asleep. Nine panels of dreaming, each different and showing how quickly the dream is changing. It’s the kind of page you could hang on your wall as a “this is Ed Pinsent” frame.
As for the story, Ed has gone with almost no speaking. It’s all Windy’s thoughts as you’re guided through the story. There’s a darkness to the story, despite the artwork being fairly light. Windy can no longer communicate with the Jackanapes – their language is incomprehensible. Do they even recognise Windy anymore? What will the Land of the Jackanapes bring that will solve this mystery? What has become of the original Grinning Jackanapes, one of Windy’s oldest and best friends?
The idea of having everything done through Windy’s thoughts is a bit different. A good different. It allows the story to move along at a pace while following Windy’s thought processes. It might seem at times to be like old-school comics, where there’s almost a narrator tone to things, but it allows you to see that Windy has no idea what is going on. The confusion can come across without verbalising everything. I like that.
Whether you’re a longtime fan of Ed Pinsent or simply curious about the surreal corners of small press comics, Windy Wilberforce – Jackanapes Regained offers a refreshingly introspective journey through dreamscapes, memory, and mischief. Its expressive black-and-white art and mainly internal vocals make it a standout piece. You can buy Windy Wilberforce – Jackanapes Regained from Ed Pinsent’s official site and experience the mystery firsthand.
From Comic Book News
Text by Ed Pinsent
Windy is one of my oldest characters. He first appeared on the drawing paper in 1981. The earliest full-length adventure of his was Land of the Jackanapes. In its first incarnation, my biro drawings were too crude to show to anyone; so I redrew it in 1983, and put it out as an A5 photocopy zine in the short series Moving Sagas. Later still, I replaced the sketchy lettering with computer typesetting. What I liked about the original story was Windy travelling below the ground, coming to the aid of the strange Grinning Jackanapes creature without question or hesitation. The rest of the population beneath the earth were hostile and silent, and though the story appears light-hearted and whimsical, I hoped to touch on darker themes of deception and miscommunication.
When times are hard, I send Windy below. At another difficult stage in my working life, I sent Windy below the ground again; this time he seemed to vibrate into a bleak underworld almost against his will, where he met a mysterious shouting homunculus with whom he failed to communicate on every level, despite his best efforts. Windy was utterly alone, and unsure why he was there or what he was doing. But his energy never flagged.
For this new story, some themes from the original Jackanapes Land are revisited, only now things are darker and even more uncertain. The animals are emerging as a cross between a dog, a kangaroo, and a coyote, with striped markings. They can change their shape. They speak incomprehensibly. The original Grinning Jackanapes, now understood to be one of Windy’s oldest and best friends, has become a pariah; he too has changed, into a horse. A lot of the story elements from the 1981/83 story are repeated; I like to aim for consistency in Windy’s world.
My Windy stories tends towards the very wordy, or the very elliptical. The 12 Labours story was overly verbose. The Fortress of Language story was overly concise. Today’s story contains very little dialogue, and minimal captions. To give some semblance of form and structure, I devised a grid pattern in my sketchpad where I inserted my images, symbols and themes in a series of overlapping rows, and moved them around until I achieved some symmetry in the flow. I don’t like to be too exacting or rigid about ring-composition, but the elements are there to be discovered by the reader. I also edited out a lot of material, including an early meeting with Captain Beefheart, and a widescreen vision of the fiery disasters befalling our earth. The original first page, when sketched out, had Windy thinking to himself for five panels and then speaking out loud in the last one. I liked the idea well enough to see if I could carry it off across the entire book, and here we are.
